Class action claim against Rogers after massive outage

Major outage affected the Rogers Canada-wide network on Friday. Twenty-four hours later, the situation was still not fully restored.

Telecommunications company Rogers is subject to an application for authorization Class action over the network outage that left many Canadians out of service for at least 15 hours last Friday.

Montreal-based LPC Avocat is behind this lawsuit concerning all Rogers, Fido and Chatr Mobile customers who were deprived of service, including access to 911, during the days of Friday and Saturday, as well as Quebecers who were unable to carry out banking transactions due to the outage.

In sum, the class action alleges that Rogers violated Quebec's Consumer Protection Act by not providing service on July 8 and 9 and that Rogers misled consumers by claiming to own the network on ” most reliable in Canada”.

The class action seeks compensatory and punitive damages for all members.

Canadian Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said Sunday he plans to meet with Rogers Communications CEO Tony Staffieri to discuss the importance of improving the reliability of networks across Canada. Representatives from other major telecommunications companies are also expected to attend the Monday afternoon meeting.

Mr. Staffieri, for his part, had released a statement on Saturday attributing the outage to a network system failure following a core network maintenance update, promising to do better in the future.

It's not just individual Rogers customers who have had headaches from the service disruption. Many businesses and public services found themselves unable to process debit card payments, and Interac transfers were also difficult, if not impossible.

On Monday, the Interac payments service moreover announced that another supplier, in addition to Rogers, would be added to its system in order to provide the service, without however specifying which one.

With information from Reuters